Dad's message recorded at war, a gift given decades later

At 71, Margaret Ann Wolf Harris heard her father's voice for the first time in her adult life.

Her dad, Sgt. Cody Wolf, died in World War II when his plane was shot down over Germany on Jan. 11, 1944. But a couple of weeks before his death, he contributed to a Christmas broadcast, produced by war correspondents of the Maryland newspaper The Baltimore Sun.

Wolf recorded a message in which he mentioned his baby girl, Margaret Ann. Harris, who was 17 months old when her father was killed, heard the recording for the first time 70 years later when it was rebroadcast on NPR member station WYPR.

Wolf told the interviewer he'd been thinking a lot about Catonsville, home to his parents, wife and "my 16-month-old daughter, Margaret Ann."

"It was so wonderful," Harris tells NPR's Arun Rath. "And it was not a sad thing at all. It was just a wonderful experience to know that I could hear that voice and that my father said my name. That was the most poignant part."